If a colossal miscarriage [1] allowed social-democracy to flourish in full bloom in
the Indian communist movement, to be sure, social-democrats too had to pay a
heavy price for their victory: doomed as an essentially regional force, they
could never really make any dent in the Hindi heartland. What else can one infer
from the CPI(M)'s total failure to make any headway in Bihar despite presiding
over a full-fledged model of social-democracy in neighbouring West Bengal for no
less than nine years in succession?

"Bihar is one of the most backward of Indian states, beset with rigid caste
polarisations and devoid of any history of bourgeois reforms worth the name",
argue Namboodiripad and Co.[2]
Well, these facts are as indisputable as the law -- where social-democracy ends,
revolutionary-democracy begins its journey. The same backward Bihar has proved
to be a forward post of revolutionary-democracy, with the lowest rung of society
being drawn into the vortex of peasant struggles. From the Pipra carnage to the
Arwal massacre, blood-thirsty landlord-armies to trigger-happy paramilitary
forces, protagonists of 'total revolution' to 'His Majesty's Opposition' -- none
could enforce the 'peace' of the graveyard on the flaming fields of Bihar and
none would be able to drive these unconventional actors to the backstage of
historical action.

But, will the struggle of the Bihar peasantry really be able to blaze a new
trail? Or, will it also go the way of all its predecessors, ending in a disaster
or in a compromise halfway? Today this question is haunting all sincere Marxists
as well as all who sympathise with the cause of revolutionary democracy. The
present book is the first of a series of attempts to deal with precisely this
question. But before we enter the main body of the book, let us have a glance at
the crisscross pattern of the Indian communist movement and then examine the
specific course of the Bihar peasantry.

The relations with the peasantry and with the bourgeoisie are two fundamental
questions of tactics to be solved by the communist parties in backward countries
with preponderant peasant populations. Way back in 1919, Lenin had advised the
communists of the Eastern countries to work out their own strategy basing on the
general lessons of Russia's Bolshevik revolution. He had warned them that they
might not get the answers to their problems in any communist book.

It was precisely this task that Mao Tse-tung undertook in right earnest while
the leadership of the Indian communist party miserably failed to grasp its
significance. Thus, while CPC succeeded in correctly solving the questions
concerning the Communist Party's relations with the peasantry and the
bourgeoisie at various stages of China's democratic revolution and went on to
emerge as the leader of the national liberation struggle, thereby providing
valuable guidelines for integrating Marxism-Leninism with the concrete
conditions of backward countries, the Indian communists could not develop any
consistent line to deal with the two aforesaid problems. As a result, the Indian
National Congress stole the show in India 's struggle for national liberation,
while the communists came to be regarded as its appendage and even as traitors
to the cause of freedom. True, there were various factors that did contribute to
this failure. For instance, the colonial rule of the British bourgeoisie; the
emergence and development of the Congress as a forum with a queer admixture of a
highly developed democratic functioning on the surface (regular sessions,
changing presidents, various crosscurrents coexisting and competing among
themselves etc.) and the extra-organisational authority of Gandhi based on
almost blind reverence at the core; the peculiar national, caste and communal
issues; the conflicting pieces of advice from the Comintern and from certain
Indian leaders guiding the Party from abroad etc. What was really strange,
however, was that the dominant section of the leadership developed a line of
thinking that put the Russian and Chinese experiences of revolution in general
and Lenin and Mao in particular in contradistinction to each other, and
concentrated all energies at pointing at differences in the Indian and Chinese
conditions. What a great predicament! The Communist Party of India refused to
learn anything from the great revolution in the biggest Asian country, which
incidentally was our neighbour too, and from the thoughts of its undisputed
leader Mao Tse-tung. It had nothing but ridicule for this great leader.

With the defeat of P.C. Joshi's line and in the context of the rise and fall
of Telangana (1946-51), there emerged three distinct lines in the Indian
communist movement. The line peddled by Ranadive and Co. rejected the
significance of the Chinese revolution, ferociously attacked Mao as another Tito
and advocated the simultaneous accomplishment of the democratic and the
socialist revolutions based on city-based working-class insurrections. Drawing
its sustenance from Stalin's initial suspicion about the Chinese revolution and
Mao Tse-tung, this left-adventurist line, however, ended in a great fiasco.

The line of the Andhra Secretariat drew heavily from the Chinese experiences
and the teachings of Mao in building the heroic struggle of Telangana. But the
Andhra leadership, while successfully spearheading the movement against the
feudal autocracy of the Nizam in conjunction with the Andhra Mahasabha, failed
to tackle the complex question of meeting the challenge of the Nehru government
and its army. It could not have possibly done that in the prevailing situation
and therefore the two line struggle within the Party could not be taken to its
logical conclusion. Nevertheless, Telangana remains one of the glorious chapters
in the history of peasant struggles led by the Communist Party till date and
reminds us of the first serious effort by sections of the Communist Party
leadership to learn from the experiences of the Chinese revolution and to
develop a comprehensive line for India's democratic revolution, taking agrarian
revolution as the axis.

The Nehru government embarked on the road to parliamentary democracy, paving
it with populist reforms like the zamindari abolition. Telangana having already
suffered a setback, objective conditions facilitated the dominance of a centrist
line put forward by Ajay Ghosh and Dange. This line made a big issue of the
differences between Chinese and Indian conditions and pushed the Party along the
parliamentary road.

In 1957 the communists succeeded in forming a government in Kerala, which
however, was soon overthrown while attempting radical agrarian reforms. That was
a critical juncture in the evolution of the tactics of utilising parliamentary
struggles. While experience re-emphasised the need for developing peasant
movements and subordinating all parliamentary struggles to extra-parliamentary
ones, the Party refused to learn its lesson and continued to proceed along the
beaten track. In subsequent years, following the emergence of Khruschovite
revisionism and the India-China war, the Party split into two. The Dangeite
leadership took a national chauvinist position and began to peddle the theory of
the so-called 'peaceful road to non-capitalist development'. This line of
national democratic revolution of the CPI transformed it over the years into an
appendage of the Congress. For it, feudal remnants either do not exist in India
or can be well taken care of by the Congress government itself.

The CPI(M), the other faction, went ahead with the centrist line. In the old
Ranadive tradition it continued to pit Stalin against Mao and therefore did not
wholly subscribe to Khruschov either. It does speak of people's democracy, but
the people's democracy of its conception is more akin to the people's
democracies of the East European variety. It goes on to denigrate the
experiences of the Chinese revolution and has nothing but ridicule for Mao
Tse-tung Thought. In recent years, Basavapunniah, the chief theoretical
spokesman for the CPI(M), has further intensified attacks on Mao[3]. He has virulently attacked
Mao's philosophical position on contradictions and his tactics regarding the
national bourgeoisie. Pointing to the differences between the Indian and Chinese
conditions, the CPI(M) continues to preach the impossibility of partisan war in
India, and has, once again started highlighting the old CPI appraisal of the
Chinese revolution, according to which base areas and red army had played not
much of a significant role in China, rather the massing of the Soviet troops in
Manchuria during the Second World War had been mainly responsible for the
victory of the Chinese revolution.

In their struggle against the national chauvinist leadership of the CPI,
revolutionary communists allied themselves with the CPI(M). The Party went ahead
with its parliamentary exercises, and, riding on the crest of mass movements,
formed a United Front government in West Bengal through an opportunist
coalition. The role of this government in suppressing the Naxalbari struggle
exposed the revisionist character of the leadership and, by all standards,
conditions were ripe for an all-out rebellion in the party. And rebellion it was
-- in West Bengal and Kerala the CPI(M) found its strength sufficiently eroded
while in some states entire State Committees walked out in support of Naxalbari.

The spirit behind Naxalbari was the same as in Telangana, viz., the spirit of
highlighting the role of peasant struggle in India's democratic revolution, of
drawing on the experiences of China and the teachings of Mao. However, the times
had greatly changed. Naxalbari emerged against a new background: there was the
great division in the international communist movement, land reforms and the
democratic facade of the Congress had by then lost much of their earlier
glamour, the country was facing a serious agrarian crisis that was being sought
to be resolved through the imperialist strategy of green revolution, and to top
it all, there was a grave political crisis as reflected in the first ever defeat
of the Congress in the elections to many State Assemblies. In other words,
Naxalbari emerged in a fine revolutionary situation when the ruling classes
could no longer rule in the old way. It was a direct assault on the discredited
and declining power. Moreover, this time the revisionist leadership of the party
was also clearly on the other side of the fence, presiding over the police as it
went on killing the peasants and the revolutionaries.

Different as the circumstances were, the impact was also different. Naxalbari
did not stop at Naxalbari. With the building of, first, the AICCCR and then the
CPI(ML), it spread like wildfire over many parts of India. The new revolutionary
Party emphasised the scarlet thread that ran through Leninism and the entire
course of its application in semi-colonial China by Mao Tse-tung. Making a clear
break with the Indian variety of revisionism, it decided to incorporate, apart
from Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung Thought too in its guiding ideology, and put
greater emphasis on the similarities between the Indian and Chinese conditions.
However, unlike some people who described themselves as Maoist communists, this
new Party never declared itself as a Maoist party, but simply as the genuine
Marxist-Leninist Party of India. To begin with, in its first steps on an
entirely new course of Indian revolution, the new Party had no other option but
to follow the Chinese model which at that time also provided the main form of
struggles to the peoples of Vietnam as well as of other South-East Asian
countries.

Telangana was resurrected in its spirit and colour. The air was charged with
the slogans of guerilla war, red army and Yenan and the songs of the long march.
The struggle spread to many parts of the country with West Bengal and Andhra
Pradesh emerging as the main bastions. Thousands of students and youth jumped
into the fray and revolution seemed so close. Naxalism, as a new brand of
communist movement, became a national phenomenon and a new word in the political
dictionary.

However, the euphoria was soon over. What had seemed to be the final
enactment of revolution proved to be no more than a dress rehearsal. With
hundreds having sacrificed their lives and thousands languishing in the jails,
gloom set in, and as it always happens, it was accompanied by confusion, splits
and disintegration. No one could be sure of the stand of this or that Party
leader. People changed their positions unbelievably fast. Yesterday's friends
and close comrades became today's adversaries.

For many, the dreams of liberation turned into veritable nightmares. Appeals
were issued by leaders in jail, efforts were made to reorganise the scattered
forces, but nothing could check the drift. History rolled on in its due course.
For many participants of the movement it was simplify finished and finished for
good, others continued to cherish the fond memories of the '70s with the vain
hope that a forceful repetition of the old slogans might resurrect the old
situation as well, while still others based themselves on the naive assumption
that the situation could be saved if only all the old fragments could be united
somehow or other.

In its disorganised state, the movement gave rise to all possible trends and
groupings and there ensued a protracted polemical war in the bitterest of
fashions. All sorts of people, even those considered long dead or permanently
silenced began to stage a comeback as though from oblivion. And with them came
back the whole range of questions that were supposed to have been already
resolved once and for all.

The point was how to revive the movement. Some felt it was enough to condemn
the 'line of annihilations', boycott of elections and trade unions, and so on.
Some even went so far as to condemn the CPI(ML) itself and thought that the
answer lay in reviving the AICCCR.

In the period following Emergency, Charu Mazumdar was projected as a
discredited revolutionary in West Bengal itself as the scene came to be
dominated by SN Singh and his PCC. And then came the final blow from Kanu Sanyal
who informed the world that the very struggle in Naxalbari was his brainchild,
that it was he who had built it up, resisting Charubabu's left-adventurist
forays while Charu Mazumdar only destroyed it by overriding Kanubabu's proposal
of coming to a tactical agreement with the United Front government (perhaps in
the old fashion of 'withdrawal' of the Telangana struggle by the then Party
leadership in 1951).

While all this went on under the reign of social-democracy in West Bengal,
and to a great extent, in Andhra too (the residual leadership in Srikakulam as
well as the CP Reddy faction having already joined hands with SN Singh), Bihar
had an altogether different story to tell. And to be sure, from much earlier
periods.

As alternatives to the Gandhian strategy of freedom struggle and in contrast
to it, if Bengal excelled in terrorism and in the 'leftism' of the Subhas
variety and Bombay in the strikes of the working class, Bihar came up with a
powerful Kisan Sabha movement right in the '30s.

It was at Champaran in Bihar that Gandhi began his experiments with the
peasantry, gradually evolving the strategy of mobilising the peasants in a
peaceful, non-violent Satyagraha against British rule, while discouraging any
movement against the 'swadeshi' zamindars. The peasants of Bihar did respond
zealously to every call of the freedom struggle coming from the Congress
leadership, but in each and every case they translated the restricted Congress
call into an active, often violent, movement against the zamindars. The
zamindars being the main social prop of British rule in India , the peasants
naturally interpreted these calls in the language they understood. This
objective contradiction of real life forced the interim Congress ministry of
Bihar, which assumed office in the wake of the 1937 elections, to negotiate a
written agreement with the zamindars, an event unparalleled in India 's freedom
movement. By contrast, the Kisan Sabha movement, having begun as a wing of the
Congress, gradually detached itself from the Congress and came under the fold of
the revolutionary democrats, a sizeable section later joining the Communist
Party. History clearly shows that during the Kisan Sabha movement caste-based
polarisations had all receded into the background. Also the anti-Brahminical
movements or Ambedkar-type dalit movements or the harijan cause of Jagjivan Ram
could never find much favour in Bihar during the entire phase of the freedom
struggle even as the CPI and the Socialists successfully developed a strong
base. If the CPI still retains a powerful base, it is more due to the legacy of
the Kisan Sabha movement and certain positive achievements in the 50s during the
period of Telangana.

In the post-independence period, to prevent the outbreak of Telangana-type
struggles, once again Bihar was selected as the focal point for Vinoba Bhave's
Sarvodaya strategy. An erstwhile Socialist and an activist of the Kisan Sabha
movement, Jai Prakash became the chief exponent of Sarvodaya in Bihar. But the
agrarian reality of Bihar prevailed over their high-sounding rhetoric, and with
Bhoodan ending in a big fiasco, Vinoba returned to Wardha and, JP too,
temporarily retired from public life. The retreat of Vinoba and JP was followed
by the advent of the political crisis of the mid-60s, and it was against this
backdrop that Naxalbari immediately found its echo in the Musahari block of
Muzaffarpur district in North Bihar. But soon the struggle there suffered a
setback and once again JP jumped into the fray armed with his neo-Sarvodaya
strategy, which later developed into his famous theory of 'total revolution'.

While JP went ahead with his avowed aim of combating the 'menace of
Naxalism', revolutionary communists, too, continued with their attempts to
develop peasant struggles in different parts of Bihar, though with little
success in the beginning. But just when things seemed to be going exactly the
Bengal way by the end of 1971, quite unexpectedly the Central Bihar districts of
Bhojpur, and to a lesser extent, Patna started sending encouraging signals.
Rooted deep in the prevailing social conditions, the struggle in Bhojpur and
Patna began on a different note and there emerged a non-traditional indigenous
core of leadership.

All the precious blood of our heroic martyrs spilt over the fields and
factories, hamlets and lanes, torture chambers and prison cells all over the
country seemed to rise high in the sky, and there appeared a red glow over
Bhojpur. And, as subsequent years have proved, the glow was not that of a
meteor, but that of a star, a red star that has come here to stay and shine.

The independent course of the peasant struggle and the Party's attempt to
impart consciousness to it went through a peculiar phase of unity and struggle.
The Party worked hard to develop communist elements from among the peasant
vanguards, always trying to check the spontaneous negative tendencies of the
movement and give it an organised shape. There were, however, also strong
attempts on the part of the Party to super-impose its set of dogmatic ideas
regarding forms of struggle and organisation on the movement and, to be sure,
these attempts proved counter-productive.

Finally, the Party-wide rectification movement in the changed political
situation of the post-Emergency period helped to restore the balance and
provided new momentum to the fledgling peasant struggle, and we arrived at the
present phase of a widespread peasant awakening. Paradoxically, the victim of
this entire development was S N. Singh[4] , who hailed from Bihar, and, that too from Bhojpur
itself. The ghost of Charu Mazumdar chased him away from Bihar and in communist
revolutionary circles in the state, he became the most discredited person.

Incidentally, the 'credit' for the first, and so far, the only fundamental
division in the CPI(ML) goes to none other than the Bihar State Committee under
the leadership of S.N. Singh. All other divisions are either artificial,
temporary or of no great significance. Attempts have been made and are still
being made to formulate a comprehensive 'left' line by certain groups, but no
one can claim, as yet, to have developed such a line. Semi-anarchism is still at
best a tendency debating over forms and methods of struggle and organisation,
and a major section of those presently obsessed with this tendency will surely
come back to the Marxist-Leninist fold as they gain more experience with the
passage of time. In contrast, SN's was a definite alternative tactical line
advocating well-defined relations with well-defined social forces. That is why
he was resurrected again and again and continues to assert even after his death
at one pole of our movement. His essential difference with Charu Mazumdar began
on the question of the relation with rich peasants. He emphasised unity with the
rich peasants in contrast to CM's emphasis on neutralising them through
struggle. Subsequently, this line developed into that of unity with sections of
the class of landlords and with the bourgeois opposition. (Bhaskar Nandy
temporarily outwitted SN by theorising this unity on the basis of a totally
different premise. However, SN soon withdrew himself from Nandy's erroneous
theoretical exercise.)

Later on, on the question of united front, SN and we both started from the
same premise of developing a nationwide political alternative to the Congress
rule. But the similarity ended here itself as SN chose to follow a totally
different course, joining hands with JP, cultivating relations with the leaders
of the Janata Party and a host of liberals, condemning the key role of agrarian
revolution, end even going so far as to coin the now famous formulation that the
proletariat may or may not lead the democratic revolution. True, under various
pressures and compulsions, subsequently SN did have to compromise on many of his
pronouncements, but these were more in the nature of tactics and did not affect
his essential position.

We, on the other hand, stood for boldly expanding the peasant struggles which
no doubt hit substantial sections of the rich peasants too who in Bihar do
indulge in serious feudal practices. And precisely on the basis of these
struggles did we work for developing the revolutionary bloc of the workers,
peasants and the petty bourgeoisie as an alternative to the Congress rule even
as we left the door open for tactical manoeuvrings with the parties and factions
of the bourgeois opposition.

It is in the context of this struggle between the two tactical lines that the
peasant struggle in Bihar developed and expanded.

Emerging as it did in a different setting of the international communist
movement the peasant struggle in Bihar did not get open support from the Chinese
Communist Party, and in the face of sharp factional divisions, it even failed to
receive a sympathetic hearing, let alone necessary support, from various
communist revolutionary groups in India. Here was a situation that was really
vastly different from what obtained during the struggles of Naxalbari and
Srikakulam. However, the movement has indeed gained widespread solidarity from
many quarters. In fact, it would have been impossible to sustain the movement
for all these long years, had it not been for the valuable guidance provided by
many veterans of the Indian communist movement and important leaders of the
united CPI(ML), the help and cooperation received from the communist
revolutionary ranks belonging to different groups and from Marxist academicians,
revolutionary-democrats, civil liberty organisations, truth-seeking journalists,
noted cultural personalities and progressive Indian circles abroad, and the
support extended by the Communist Parties of China, Nepal, Philippines, Peru and
other foreign friends.

The current struggle in Bihar is expanding in districts which have a fighting
heritage dating back to the old Kisan Sabha days. These are the districts where
the incidence of big landlordism is low, but where landlordism enjoys a wider
base, encompassing not only the ex-intermediaries but also erstwhile powerful
raiyats. Compared to many other parts of Bihar, agriculture in these districts
is marked by a relatively greater use of modern means, better transport
facilities and a more pronounced market-orientation of the rural economy. The
various agrarian issues that have come to the fore in these districts are
similar to those which affect the rural poor all over India, viz., minimum
wages, tenancy rights, occupation of vested, benami, communal and government
lands, prevention of distress sale of crops, easy availability of various inputs
at cheaper rates and so on and so forth. In short, the region to a great extent
is a typical representative of the changing pattern of Indian agriculture.

Indian agriculture today is also facing a new type of crisis caused by the
saturation of the strategy of green revolution and 'overproduction'. And as a
direct outcome of this crisis, there has emerged a new type of farmers' movement
in certain parts of India. In Maharashtra, in particular, it has found a fertile
field as well as a powerful exponent in Mr.Sharad Joshi. The theoretical
framework propounded by Mr.Joshi focuses on the contradiction[5] between poor rural Bharat[6] and rich urban India, stresses economic
upliftment of the peasants as the cure-all for all the ills being faced by the
country today, and concentrates exclusively on the single-point-demand of
remunerative prices for agricultural produce. He does not believe that any
substantial ground exists for major conflicts among different sections of the
rural population, and it goes without saying that the peasants of his conception
are none other than the rich and middle farmers. As to why he is not laying any
particular stress on the agricultural labourers, Mr.Joshi holds that, first, any
economic gains achieved by the peasants will automatically percolate to the
former by way of higher wages, and second, the lowest strata of the people have
never played the vanguard role in history in bringing about social
transformation.

Despite his agitational mode of operation, it is this emphasis on rural
development coupled with his insistence on non-party politics and his persistent
anti-communist bias that has endeared Mr.Joshi to the Sarvodayites, who are
perhaps in search of a new messiah after the departure of both Vinoba and JP.

So, one now witnesses a battle for supremacy between the East and West winds
within the peasant movement, blowing respectively from Bihar and Maharashtra. In
sharp contrast to the farmers' movement in Maharashtra, the peasant struggle in
Bihar has in its forefront the agrarian labourers, who are quite numerous, as
well as the poor and lower-middle peasants, while sizeable sections of the
kulaks including, in certain pockets, elements from certain backward castes,
find themselves on the other side of the fence, as a veritable target of attack,
at least in the present phase of the movement. But even as the movement lays the
highest stress on thoroughgoing land reforms, it does also strive to incorporate
the issues arising out of the crisis of green revolution, issues that affect
large segments of the middle and upper-middle peasants.

The outcome of this battle between the two winds has not yet been decided,
and the final sequences of what may prove to be a most fascinating epic-drama in
the history of India have not unfolded themselves either. Still, when the
unceremonious death of the poorest among the peasants in the unknown, unheard
of, dingy, mud-tracked, tiny country-town of Arwal[7] begins to shape the political crisis of the
powers that be in Bihar, one can safely proclaim that the heroes have finally
arrived on the stage.

Notes

1. Setback in the first
revolutionary upsurge following Naxalbari in the face of brutal repression.

2. This was the logic advanced by
the CPI(M) General Secretary EMS Namboodiripad to explain its failure in Bihar.

3. See "On Contradictions --
Antagonistic and Non-antagonistic" in the Social Scientist, September 1983

4. Quite interestingly, SN had at
one time slandered the Bhojpur struggle as being guided and financed by Jagjivan
Ram and later on, the dominant section of the PCC leadership also preferred to
dismiss Bhojpur as a purely caste struggle. Late Comrade CP, during my [VM's --
Ed.] talks with him, revealed how on persistent enquiries by the Chinese
comrades about Bhojpur, Bhaskar Nandy had continued to repeat similar
allegations. CP, however, differed with them and was even inclined to consider
that annihilation, as practiced in Bhojpur, did have practical justification.

5. Interestingly, Mr.Joshi refers to
Rosa Luxemburg in his support as against Lenin. He is also very much against
Stalin's tackling of the kulaks. However, his comments on Mao are not known.

6. To be fair to him, it must,
however, be acknowledged that his rural Bharat does also include sections of the
urban poor slumdwellers for instance, whom he considers as peasants driven away
by poverty.